Arts and culture enrich our lives, our communities, and our nation. In this pivotal moment in our history, there is a growing recognition that the arts reveal new ideas, unlock opportunities, and help us confront the many challenges before us. On January 30, 2024, the White House Domestic Policy Council and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) co-hosted Healing, Bridging, Thriving: A Summit on Arts and Culture in our Communities, a first-of-its-kind convening to share insights and explore opportunities for arts organizations and artists to contribute to the health and well-being of individuals and communities, invigorate physical spaces, fuel democracy, and foster equitable outcomes. In this blog series, you’ll hear from the many diverse perspectives represented at the event—including government officials, policymakers, artists, advocates, academics, and arts leaders—as they share what ideas and inspiration they took from the experience, and how they’re working to advance a broader understanding of how arts and culture can contribute to other fields and unlock new opportunities for artists.

The arts own entertainment. And for thousands of years, we have relied on their dopamine hits to amplify celebration, end doldrums, and stimulate sensations that make us feel alive.

The dominance and directness of this joy function also contributes to the arts being called non-essential—that is until we are periodically forced to face our reliance on artistic expression as life support. Covid lockdown media streaming, reading, and craftwork exemplify that dependence.

Unlike the pandemic, the Healing, Bridging, Thriving Summit co-hosted by the White House Domestic Policy Council and the National Endowment for the Arts in January 2024 was a non-traumatic invitation to expand thinking about the arts. Its focus was cross-sector partnerships: the ways that the arts can intersect with non-arts departments of life to spark novel perspective-seeing and solutions. 

From the ceremonial to the scholarly, summit content was dense, though I never reached an absorption limit because successive remarks by speakers kept finding space in my brain and I liberally took hallway stretch breaks where I downloaded with peers. Further into the evening, I was becoming even more effervescent, chatty, and speculative.

Returning home to Michigan, I realized that bubbling in me was curiosity; the convening had succeeded in motivating me to new types of question-asking and possibility-thinking. Months later, I tapped this refreshed energy of openness to help our CultureSource team reshape one of our annual funding programs around cross-sector partnerships.

We had four sources of guidance in program development:

•  the Healing, Bridging, Thriving summit speech by Arts Endowment Chair Maria Rosario Jackson,

• the article, "Cross-Sector Initiatives Should Start Small," in the Spring 2024 Stanford Social Innovation Review,

• an essay Jay Pension wrote for CultureSource on recognizing the value of cross-sector partnerships (Jay is on faculty in the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance),

• and the Full Frame Initiative's digital platform with wide-ranging resources on wellbeing.

The structure of the reworked program, funded by the Hudson-Webber Foundation and The Kresge Foundation, is straightforward, offering funds to arts professionals to have a first-contact meeting with a non-arts prospective collaborator working in issues about water or wellbeing. A brief participant questionnaire encourages meetings that embrace a spirit curiosity and its submission is the only criteria for receiving funds. With data from all completed meetings' agendas and readouts, this fall we plan to reflect on the questions that participant connections surfaced and plot next steps with colleagues and sector stakeholders.

This work of small experimentation feels like an imperative for us at CultureSource. As a city- and region-focused arts organization, we are on the ground working alongside leaders and artists daily as they experience complex emerging realities and contexts in their creative practices. The vanguard positioning of our organization and other local arts agencies is an infrastructure asset of our field to be leveraged. We have the ability to rapidly imagine and implement new strategy. And with recurring doses of inspiration (from convenings like the summit), and proximity to peers succeeding and making mistakes—we can learn our way forward, step by step, into new paradigms of service and impact.

Since the summit, cross-sector partnerships have been coming up more and more as strategy themes in my network: from talks with peer city- and region-focused arts leaders and with our state arts agency, to news of fellow summit attendees’ meaningful advances in their pioneering work. The common curiosity of those conversations and reports is, "What could be?” That orientation toward optimism and mobilization is critical in the arts supporting aspirations for healing, bridging, and thriving in the U.S.

Omari Rush is the executive director of CultureSource in Detroit, which advances efforts to have creative expression thrive in communities.